Rainbow-Colored Zebrafish May Hold The Secret To Regenerate Cells

Researchers have created a psychedelic fish to learn more about the way skin regenerates after it has been damaged."One of the barriers to studying regeneration has been to visualize it at high resolution, examining what individual cells are doing and what a large number of individual cells are doing collectively," says senior author Kenneth Poss, a cell biologist at Duke University. "We can catch all of that with this kind of imaging."

The technique that labels individual neurons, genetically color-codes skin cells in the 'Skinbow,' this system allows researchers to track cell populations in real time, according to Science Daily.“It's like you have given each cell an individual barcode,” said Chen-Hui Chen, a postdoctoral fellow in Poss’s lab and lead author on the study. “You can precisely see how individual cells collectively behave during regeneration.”Poss added, “these are quite different cellular mechanisms, and one would not be able to detect the sequence or the appearance of these mechanisms without being able to track all or most of the cells on the surface of the fin.This is a very powerful system to see how regeneration happens.”